A new book from Rebecca Solnit, promising to bring us hope in these "difficult times", is among our pick of popular science titles out this month - along with a guide on how to talk to AI, and a look at modern warfare March, in the northern hemisphere anyway, is about venturing out for some much-needed vitamin D and dodging showers. Forget that - just head for a decent café where you can delve into the marvellous science books we've got waiting for you. This month you can explore how animals shaped our world, how to spot liars from their language, what forest trees can tell us - and flowers as revolutionaries. There is some stronger stuff too, if you are in the mood: try AI in the hands of the US military, or a deep cultural look at how our world has changed beyond recognition. Whatever your choice, it's all guaranteed to enrich the inner you.

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season's weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse. At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that "[w]e're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it" and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it's prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to "solve" climate, saying: "I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it." Eventually is not good enough. A distinguished group of scientists said in a paper published on 8 October: "We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.

It also made me wonder how applicable other metaphors might be: rationalizing, performing, adapting, mocking up?